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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

I start with pointing out that Obama ran for election on the promise to get all our troops out of Iraq; and after he pulled out all our troops as president, he boasted that he'd gotten our troops out.

But I am to believe that in between President Obama tried really, really hard to keep our troops in Iraq?

Please. I'm not stupid enough to believe that and I don't believe Democrats are stupid enough to believe it either.

The fact is we didn't try hard to get an agreement, and offered too few troops to be an effective counter to Iranian influence. So the Iraqis would not risk angering Iran for too small of a guarantee.

And for added humor, the president claims that we had to have a SOFA deal that was approved by Iraq's legislative body to be valid rather than an executive agreement.

Mr. "pen and phone" has bypassed our own legislative body routinely and is proud of it. Yet that wasn't enough for a SOFA to defend our hard-won gains in Iraq?

And for bonus humor, we have more troops in Iraq now than what President Obama offered prior to our departure, yet rely on an executive approved agreement with Iraq to protect our troops in Iraq today.

Two Pinocchios doesn't seem enough to me. That it got two tells you how misleading the claim is given the fact checkers often bend over backwards to fit whatever square statement Democrats make into the round hole of truthiness and make all the right assumptions to conclude someone with an R after their name is judged wrong.

In clear and unequivocal terms, former Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta confirms precisely what conservative critics, lawmakers, former officials, tactical experts and military officials have said about Iraq: President Obama was advised to keep a stay-behind force and warned about the consequences if he did not. He preferred to keep his campaign pledge to get all the troops out. The White House therefore allowed negotiations to falter for a status of forces agreement and bragged it had gotten all the troops out. Iraq has now collapsed.

And to repeat, the form of guaranteeing the safety of our troops against political prosecution that was unacceptable to President Obama in 2011 is what we have now with about 6,000 troops in Iraq for Iraq War 2.0:

And of course now that Obama may need to re-insert troops he has accepted the very sort of personal representation from Maliki that was available to him in 2011[.]

Oh well. So a few eggs had to be broken? President Obama got a lovely 2012 "responsibly ending our wars" omelet for his reelection campaign. That's what is really important, eh?

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!